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The Work of Director Stéphane Sednaoui

Palm Pictures hit paydirt when it dug into the pasts of Spike Jonze,
Michel Gondry, and Chris Cunningham. The resulting DVDs, released under
The Directors Label, featured the brilliant early works of unknown
talents who would later become major influences in film. The Directors
Label continues to dig for hidden gems with The Work of Director
Stéphane Sednaoui.

Early in his photography career, Stéphane Sednaoui hit the big time
when he made a video of the Red Hot Chili Peppers performing their
Blood Sugar Sex Magik song “Give it Away” while slathered with
silver paint and glitter. He keyed their pumped-up punk-reggae sound to
imagery that added to the band’s youth and tribal energy and in one
fell
swoop made the band more visible to the whole world.

Sednaoui’s success with the Chili Peppers opened the door for his
music-video work with other bands: U2, Björk, Alanis Morissette,
Garbage, and Tricky. Interviews with Sednaoui and the musicians give us
more insight into this engaging young director.

Sednaoui has worked as a photographer in fashion and journalism and
many of his music videos have a very stylized, photographic quality as
a
result. They all tell — or at least suggest — elaborate stories as
backdrops for the characters he creates. You can see serendipitous
imagery in Sednaoui’s choices. He makes juxtapositions that work with
the songs, despite his admission that when coming up with the concepts
for his videos, he never listens to the “text.”

Videos

Stephane Sednaoui works in mysterious ways

Movie facts

MPAA rating

NR

Year released

2005

DVD Features

Talent interviews

Four short movies

56-page booklet

DVD scorecard

Picture:

****

Sound:

****

Extras:

****

Overall:

***1/2

See also

Directors Label

Although Sednaoui’s music video concepts are not quite as playful
and
mind-boggling as those in the videos of Michel Gondry, another
directors
featured on the Directors Label, his videos are intriguing for their
imagery and for the performances he elicits from a diverse array of
popular musicians. In the videos featuring Björk and those with REM’s
Michael Stipe, you can see how Sednaoui works with the performers until
they can do nothing but be themselves.

Not all the performers he works with, however, can pull this off.
Self-consciousness pervades the almost-explicit Mirwais’ videos and
actress/director Sofia Coppola’s performance as a druggie chick in the
Black Crowes’ “Sometimes Salvation” video.

Some of the director’s favorite effects involve lighting up parts of
people’s bodies. He uses luminous or phosphorescent paint on people so
they glow and pulse and flow in interesting ways, a clumsier but
appropriately human version of the chromed-body effect in Terminator
2. But my own favorite in this collection of videos is “For Real,”
with Tricky singing about life as a pop star among mobsters in
Chinatown
with an animation effect that is beguiling to watch, but nowhere near
as
beguiling as Tricky’s character in the video.

Other Stuff — Interviews and Q & A

Excellent and humorous editing elevates some of the special
features.
Flea, of the Chili Peppers, talks about working with Sednaoui: “He is a
very sort of emotional, dramatical, flamboyant video-type director
character. A lot of guys are more studious and cerebral about it, and
he’s very emotional about it, and getting really excited, which is
nice.” The camera cuts to Sednaoui, often animated but here looking
extremely studious and cerebral.

From the interviews, we learn that Björk had danced on a truckbed
for
nine hours in one day. And Stipe recalls another video shoot as eight
hours of “calisthenic” writhing, with much of that time spent balanced
along a two-by-four-inch beam painted red. But Stipe has nothing but
admiration for Sednaoui, much like the other interviewees.

In the Interviews we get to know the director better. He has an
endearingly humble personality. His first attempt at a short film bears
the following disclaimer: “The purpose of showing my first short film
is
to give hope to anyone that has failed (like I did) on his or her first
attempt. It took me 3 viewings to remember the story.” (And it’s pretty
awful.) At an NYU question-and-answer session, superimposed titles
correct his often less-than-accurate information as he speaks: “I was
in this little town in Morocco...” Title: “Fez: Population
500,000.”

Sednaoui tells entertaining stories on the Interviews segment, like
the one about his dislike of Mariah Carey’s music. “I like her voice,
but I don’t like her music,” he says, but when he first heard her he
tried to give her CD a fair listen. One night he listened to it, and
concluded, “No, this isn’t for me.” But the next morning he ripped a
copy of what he thought was Carey’s CD and listened to the copy over
the
course of the day. “No, wait,” he thought. “This is pretty good!” So
when he got home he picked up the phone, all ready to call Mariah’s
people and propose a video with her, but this feeling that “something
weird was happening” came over him and he stopped. Sednaoui went to the
CD player but the one he’d copied turned out to be a Queen Latifah
album. So he never did a video for Carey.

When Bono says of Sednaoui, “He’s much cooler than anyone in his
videos,” his compliment is suffused with enough raw jealousy of the
charming Frenchman’s allure that you can tell he truly means it. The
material bears it out, revealing Sednaoui as a curious and funny
person.

Short Films

The four short films included are: “Reve Reche,” his failed attempt
at a first film; an animation inspired by Björk’s song “Army of Me”; a
12-minute short film layering a story about the seamy lives of a few
young hustlers with Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” as the
soundtrack, including a walk-on by Reed himself; and my least favorite
of his films for its extremely abstract existentialism, “Acqua Natasa.”

The most vivid among these films is “Walk on the Wild Side,”
Sednaoui
goes where the material takes him; the sex scenes and full-frontal
nudity here would make this video collection a poor holiday gift for a
preteen. From the crotch shots in the Red Hot Chili Peppers to the
staged orgy for Mirwais (which has some of the theatrical creepiness of
Eyes Wide Open), many of Sednaoui’s themes and images border on
explicit.

Booklet

The 56-page booklet contains only Sednaoui’s photographs from the
sets of various video shoots and some of the storyboards for those
music
videos. They are a fun historical artifact, but the lack of text makes
it difficult to locate detailed information about the videos and their
production. You’re better off watching the Interviews feature and the
video credits on the DVD if you want hard data.

Picture and Sound

This DVD’s picture and sound quality show off all the beauty
Sednaoui
seeks in his work. You get the grit and glam of the Chili Peppers’
grainily filmed “Give it Away,” alongside the fluid fire and Moroccan
mosaics of U2’s “Mysterious Ways.” His black-and-white videos are
especially gorgeous to watch.

Overall

Beyond his skill at setting scenes, Sednaoui’s expertise is in
getting out of the way of the performers and the song. The musicians
clearly trust him enough to let him get close; each of the best
performers here reveals something personal. The videos may be
contrived,
or about other characters, but the best ones all capture something
elemental about that person or group. When The Red Hot Chili Peppers,
U2, Michael Stipe, and Björk truly throw themselves into these
performances with abandon, Sednaoui shows us what makes them great
performers.